Last week, Michaels Stores was slapped with a class action lawsuit in Missouri federal court that accused the craft store chain of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Michaels is accused of breaking the law because it failed to properly disclose that a candidate's consumer report might be obtained during the hiring process.

Don’t worry if you’re unaware of the FCRA, a little-known federal law that regulates how consumer reports--creditworthiness, criminal background reports, prior traffic reports--can be used. It comes into play when employers want to check the backgrounds of prospective employees. (Michaels did not return a request for comment.)

While the general public likely knows little about the FCRA, employers like Whole Foods, Dollar General, and Publix Super Markets are becoming intimately familiar with the law because--like Michaels--they are getting sued over it.

The FCRA was originally enacted in 1970 to protect the privacy of individuals' personal information, as the credit reporting industry began assembling and disseminating reports to credit card companies, banks, employers, and landlords. It’s only recently that employers have been hit with a wave of lawsuits for allegedly violating the act.

So, what are employers being sued for?

Technicalities, mostly. Before running a background check on an applicant, according to the FCRA, an employer has to give notice and ask for authorization in a way that's "clear and conspicuous" so it stands out from the rest of a job application, says Denise Trani-Morris, an employment lawyer at the Sedgwick firm in San Fracisco. Employers keep fumbling over that step. "They think, 'Oh by the way, we're an at-will employer, so we'll just include that alongside the consent form. Aren't we being good?' No, actually, you just violated the law," she says. "Or their application is online and it's one big steady stream of information." That too, she says, is illegal.

The nitty-gritty particulars don't stop there. An employer must notify candidates if it plans to not hire them because of the results of a background check before actually doing so. That lag, in theory, should let applicants fix any errors in their consumer report before their candidacy is crippled completely.

These guidelines, while intricate, are nothing new, and that makes the recent slew of lawsuits all the more puzzling. Trani-Morris, who represents employers, attributes the trend to increasingly sophisticated plaintiffs lawyers who have identified the FCRA as a particularly vulnerable area that's "ripe for class actions" and where "penalties are significant," she says.

Retailers and restaurants seem to be favorite targets since their frequent hiring increases the potential pool of job applicants subjected to potentially illegal background checks. And the more people affected by an illegal practice, the more money's at stake. Plus, Trani-Morris says, state and city laws pertaining to background checks complicate matters, especially for employers that outsource the job application process to third-party vendors.

In March, a class action lawsuit demanding $10 million filed in California accused Whole Foods of failing to provide applicants with a standalone disclosure form. (The court dismissed the case in October 2014.) Chuck E. Cheese was hit with a similar lawsuit in California in March (the case is ongoing). Panera was accused of the same violation in Florida in July, though the case has since been dismissed. That same month, current employees and job applicants sued Century 21 Department Stores in an ongoing case for running background checks without first obtaining their permission.

While retailers seem particularly susceptible they're not the only ones getting sued. Last week, Paramount Pictures was slapped with a lawsuit for procuring a consumer report during the job search process without issuing a separate disclosure.

These lawsuits may come across as minor hairsplitting, but they're costing companies real money.

In October, Dollar General agreed to pay $4 million to settle claims that it didn't properly notify more than 200,000 job applicants of background checks. (The settlement is still subject to a February 25 fairness hearing.) Earlier last year, grocery chain Publix agreed to pay $6.8 million to settle claims that it violated the FCRA. In Publix's case, the company was sued for burying the disclosure form alongside other application materials. In these cases, legal nitpicking paid off.

Learn more of the latest news about Dollar General from Fortune’s video team:

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/01/16/whole-foods-dollar-general-panera-hiring-lawsuit/feed/0A customer checks out of a Whole Foods Market in Washington,clairezillmanOculus Rift to bring virtual reality to Chuck E. Cheese’shttp://fortune.com/2014/05/21/oculus-rift-to-bring-virtual-reality-to-chuck-e-cheeses/
http://fortune.com/2014/05/21/oculus-rift-to-bring-virtual-reality-to-chuck-e-cheeses/#commentsWed, 21 May 2014 13:44:25 +0000http://beta.fortune.com/?p=386861]]>FORTUNE — Some lucky kids will soon be able to test the virtual reality headgear made by recent Facebook FB acquisition Oculus Rift while surrounded by cheap pizza and singing robotic animals.

Chuck E. Cheese’s, the restaurant and entertainment chain “Where a kid can be a kid,” said Tuesday the headset will be part of a new Virtual Ticket Blaster Experience birthday package that will be available in select markets for a six-week trial-run starting this week. The package adapts the chain’s normal Ticket Blaster experience — wherein the birthday boy or girl goes into a booth and attempts to grab as many falling gaming tickets as possible — in virtual reality.

Considering that a consumer version of Oculus Rift’s product has yet to be released commercially, the Chuck E. Cheese’s offer may be one of the first opportunities for members of the public to try the hardware outside of a tech conference — that is, assuming their parents make a birthday party reservation. The birthday packages will be available at Dallas-Fort Worth area Chuck E. Cheese’s locations as early as today, with the equipment becoming available at more locations in that area, as well as Orlando, Fla. and San Diego, later this month.

The Oculus Rift headset features 360-degree head-tracking technology along with 3-D views that let users “feel as though they are inside the Ticket Blaster with Chuck E.,” the company said. The headset will track the number of virtual tickets grabbed by the birthday kid, who can then redeem them for merchandise. The company says the Virtual Ticket Blaster game was developed by Dallas-based visual effects studio Reel FX.

Roger Cardinale, president of Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company CEC Entertainment, Inc., said in a statement that children currently have “unprecedented access” to gaming options. “Our challenge is to deliver an experience not available at home, and there is no doubt virtual reality does just that. Oculus Rift technology is the next frontier in the gaming industry, and we’re thrilled to be able to say it’s part of the Chuck E. Cheese’s lineup,” he said.

In March, Facebook agreed to pay $2 billion to acquire Oculus Rift, which got its start raising capital through Kickstarter before finding venture funding. The Irvine, Calif.-based company is expected to release its first commercial virtual reality headsets sometime next year. (CEC Entertainment was also recently sold, with buyout firm Apollo Global Management paying $1.3 billion for the company earlier this year.)

Chuck E. Cheese’s may seem like an odd choice for an early look at the virtual reality gaming platform, but the chain’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, is no stranger to working with gaming startups, having also co-founded the pioneering video game company Atari. As The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal pointed out last year, Bushnell actually came up with the concept of Chuck E. Cheese’s as an extension of Atari, whose coin-operated games were featured prominently at the chain’s early locations, allowing Bushnell to “vertically integrate the market.”